On Criterion, I watched the 1961 Japanese film Girls of the Night, also known as Girls of Dark, directed by Kinuyo Tanaka and written by Sumie Tanaka. The film is a drama that is an indictment of the criminalization of sex work, and the moral judging by society of women who are sex workers, putting a stigma on them, refusing to let them move on from their past, and forever marking them with a scarlet letter. The film is set after the passing of the real-life Prostitution Prevention Law, a Japanese law passed in 1956 to to prevent prostitution, and to protect and rehabilitate sex workers, where in the film, former sex workers are sent to a reformatory to learn new skills and to start their lives over. While the law is not meant to punish sex workers, it is an anti-sex work law, and the law doesn't prevent women from being stigmatized for their past work.
The film centers on Kuniko (Chisako Hara), a former sex worker who is trying to build a new life for herself after staying in the reformatory. She goes through a cycle of jobs, working in a grocery store, a factory, and a rose garden, but each time her past is uncovered, both men and women either treat her like a threat or a target of abuse. In one scene, three men go for a walk with her, expecting to run a train on her, but she scares them off when she asserts herself like a businesswoman, demanding that they pay her, before they run off and she collapses into tears at the disappointment of being treated like a whore again. She's abused by a group of women who want to "teach her a lesson," thinking she's haughty or stuck-up. Or when she feels like she's found love, only for his family to shun her and say that they come from a lineage of great samurais and that their son marrying an ex-prostitute would ruin their family legacy.
Tanaka's film takes a remarkably sensitive approach to addressing the plight of sex workers in Japan, whose careers were suddenly made illegal, and not condemning them for their lives. The headmistress at the reformatory, Nogami (Chikage Awashima), notes how the women had entered sex work for their survival due to poverty, lack of opportunities, or a man leading them into it, and she has great sympathy for the women she works with, and does believe that they should not be criminalized for their past livelihoods in an unfair society.
Kinuyo Tanaka was an actress and director, and worked with the director Kenji Mizoguchi, on 15 films including The Life of Oharu (1952) and Ugetsu (1953). With her 1953 directorial debut, Love Letter, she became the second Japanese woman to direct a film, after Tazuko Sakane. Similarly, Sumie Tanaka was a screenwriter and playwright with a feminist agenda, who collaborated with Kinuyo Tanaka on several films, and was acclaimed for her career.
Hara was fantastic in this film, playing Kuniko with a lot of strength and dignity, and refusing to be beaten down no matter how many times others try to shame or denigrate her for her sex worker past. She sees herself as her own heroine, finding redemption in herself and not from other people, and the film ends on a hopeful note with her being her own woman on her own journey, feeling like Giulietta Masina's sex worker character in La Strada, always moving forward with her own sense of optimism despite what others may say.
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